virtualenv
pip is most nutritious when used with virtualenv. One of the reasons pip
doesn’t install “multi-version” eggs is that virtualenv removes much of the need
for it. Because pip is installed by virtualenv, just use
path/to/my/environment/bin/pip to install things into that
specific environment.
To tell pip to only run if there is a virtualenv currently activated,
and to bail if not, use:
export PIP_REQUIRE_VIRTUALENV=true
easy_install
pip was originally written to improve on easy_install in the following ways:
- All packages are downloaded before installation. Partially-completed
installation doesn’t occur as a result.
- Care is taken to present useful output on the console.
- The reasons for actions are kept track of. For instance, if a package is
being installed, pip keeps track of why that package was required.
- Error messages should be useful.
- The code is relatively concise and cohesive, making it easier to use
programmatically.
- Packages don’t have to be installed as egg archives, they can be installed
flat (while keeping the egg metadata).
- Native support for other version control systems (Git, Mercurial and Bazaar)
- Uninstallation of packages.
- Simple to define fixed sets of requirements and reliably reproduce a
set of packages.
pip doesn’t do everything that easy_install does. Specifically:
- It cannot install from eggs. It only installs from source. (In the
future it would be good if it could install binaries from Windows .exe
or .msi – binary install on other platforms is not a priority.)
- It is incompatible with some packages that extensively customize distutils
or setuptools in their setup.py files.